While Facebook might be a take it or leave it sort of proposition for a lot of users that have better luck on Twitter or Google+, it’s still used by a lot of people all over the world. In fact, since Facebook added videos to the feed and started to turn their focus to YouTube’s bread and butter, lots of people have found a lot of success with videos, earning as much as 5 times the amount of views compared to that of YouTube. These are perhaps rare cases of course, but it’s clear that Facebook is doing a lot right in order to get people excited in the service once again.
Keeping in line with their newfound love of video, Facebook introduced 7-second long “Profile Videos” towards the end of last year, allowing people to take a short video in place of their profile picture. The idea here would be that people can say a lot more in a set moving pictures, than in just one still image. Profile videos are on loop, and just like a vine or video in a Twitter feed, they’re muted until you touch them to see what people have to say or show off. Having said that, it does feel a little bit like Facebook is chasing the Vine feeling here, but it’s a fun feature that people seem to like. The only problem – as usual – was that it was launched on iOS only at first. Towards the end of 2015 they did start to appear a little more on Android, but now it appears that this feature is rolling out even further. Android Police have noticed the new feature on their devices, but we can’t seem to see it our end.
The feature is neatly explained by Facebook’s video embedded below, but it does make us wonder so many of these features continue to launch on iOS before Android. Live broadcasts are another example of this, where a feature took its sweet time to make its way over to Android. Considering that Facebook is all about having as many eyeballs using the network and creating content, it’s bizarre to see them take so long to offer new features to the massive user base that is Android.